Bike Rack Design Competition Winners Installed In Toronto

Last year TreeHugger showed the top ten finalists in OCAD's bike rack competition; Now the winners have been installed on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West. Fourth Year Students Evi Hui and Olivier Mayrand designed these speech bubbles and question marks.Evi Hui and Olivier Mayrand, image credit Jen Tse

Winning the competition was perhaps the easy part; then you have to deal with the bureaucracy. Mayrand tells Jennifer Tse of BlogTO:

Designing them wasn't the challenge so much as getting them into the real world," Mayrand said. "We spent a good two weeks designing, but actually bringing them out onto the street took another year. We needed to secure all the locations along the street, get permits from the city, address concerns like whether they would scratch people's bikes, and check to make sure the manufacturing could be done.

Michael Pham; Image Credit Jen Tse

Michael Pham had much the same problem with his simple, elegant ring, telling Jen Tse:

When you work with the city and you set a date for a project, you never know what will happen," he said. "The project was prolonged, and there was one point where they said they couldn't even build the stands. That was frustrating. It was complicated, but we eventually got it done.

Last year TreeHugger showed the top ten finalists in OCAD's bike rack competition; Now the winners have been installed on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West. Fourth Year Students Evi Hui and Olivier Mayrand